Nicky’s of Beverly is not a vegan restaurant. Since 1997 and across two different locations (three years ago they moved to 105th Street and Western), chef-owner Paul Kostopanagiotou has built a formidable following of carnivorous and plant-based eaters alike. A fast-casual neighborhood spot featuring “elevated street food, the restaurant’s massive menu features everything from salads, smoked brisket, filet mignon sliders, Nashville hot chicken, and even a lobster roll.
There’s also Nicky’s version of the Big Baby, an underrated Chicago classic that originated in the South Side, featuring twin beef patties with cheese and topped with grilled onions. Ketchup, mustard, and pickles slide under the patties.
The veganized Big Baby.
Nicky’s has a quite a comfortable space and occassionally hosts live music.
Nicky’s moved here in 2021.
Kostopanagiotou sees an opportunity to introduce non-meat eaters to the specialty. On Friday, November 1, Nicky’s will enthusiastically participate in World Vegan Day with a vegan version of the Big Baby featuring Beyond Meat patties and Daiya dairy-free cheddar taking center stage.
“We’ve been growing the vegan category at the restaurant for years. I just think vegans are a great customer base, and there was a void in the area for that,” Kostopanagiotou says.
While he’s not a vegan himself (though he and his team do enjoy plant-based dishes), he’s made a point of connecting with plant-based eaters in the community, like the Chicago Southside & South Suburban Vegans. “I know some of the founding members and admins. We lean on them a lot as a partnership, as they have suggestions and recommendations and vegan meetups,” Kostopanagiotou explains.
Through those contacts, he’s discovered a variety of plant-based producers, like Good2Go Veggie and Chunk Foods, as well as institutions that help animals. That’s where he learned about the Tiny Hooves Sanctuary, a woman-led nonprofit animal sanctuary located across state lines in Union Grove, Wisconsin. The institution focuses on providing a safe haven — a “forever sanctuary,” as their website calls it — to “abandoned, abused, neglected, and unwanted farm animals while inspiring positive change through the human and animal bond.” Kostopanagiotou said he listened to his local vegan friends when they told him, ‘’This is a solid group — you should look into donating to them.’” On Friday, Nicky’s of Beverly will donate a portion of proceeds from all vegan menu items to the Tiny Hooves Sanctuary.
The Big Baby is a Chicago classic.
Italian beef, gyros, and salads are also on the menu.
The heat lamps can squeeze a little more out of patio season.
A lot of restaurants will simply throw on a veggie burger, fried cauliflower, or maybe a half-hearted pizza to appease vegan diners who happen to wind up there, but investing in the plant-based portion of his menu is something to which Kostopanagiotou is seriously committed. Nicky’s of Beverly offers close to two dozen vegan items, such as a vegan shrimp po boy, vegan nachos, vegan Buffalo chicken salad, a vegan banh mi, and much more. There’s coconut milk-based peanut butter gelato and even a vegan shake.
Kostopanagiotou points out that he develops the vegan part of the menu side-by-side with everything else to make sure there’s plenty to enjoy for everyone. “It just continuously expands, and is creative,” he says. “I’m very mindful as I expand the normal menu that I can do that for the vegan menu also.”
There’s plenty to experience at Nicky’s of Beverly, whether customers like vegan food or not. They also have a weekday happy hour, live music, and a gelato bar.
When Peacock became the streaming hub for the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, it didn’t quite go to plan, with users complaining about limited viewing options and a glitchy interface. It was, to quote NBCUniversal Media Group chairman Mark Lazarus, a “big digital middle finger,” as well as a microcosm of Peacock’s early days: a streamer that had yet to find its footing. Fast-forward to the summer of 2024, and Peacock’s coverage of the Paris Olympics was a rousing success on multiple fronts. For one, you could watch any event on the platform in addition to Gold Zone, which was basically the Olympian equivalent of NFL RedZone. More importantly, Peacock’s viewership rose by one-third in July, the highest growth for any streaming service that month. By any measure, Peacock delivered on the big stage.
But while the streamer mastered its Olympics coverage, it’s not the kind of thing that’ll necessarily keep subscribers around for the long haul. (Some shrewd users might pay for Peacock for the duration of the Olympics, cancel it, and repeat the cycle in four years’ time.) Instead, what’ll really give Peacock a foothold in the Streaming Wars is a consistent stream (pun unintended) of must-watch programming. Depending on what you’re looking for, Peacock already has something to offer. On the sports front, NFL fans have access to Sunday Night Football, while soccer obsessives like myself get their Premier League fix on the platform. (Soon, Peacock will add NBA coverage to its sports catalog, which, unfortunately, comes at the expense of Inside the NBA, a show so sacred it should be protected in the Constitution.) There’s also plenty of reality TV to savor, from the Bravoverse to buzzy originals like The Traitors. But there’s one area where Peacock continues to flounder: scripted series.
With the notable exception of Poker Face, the Peabody- and Emmy-nominated crime comedy from Rian Johnson, Peacock hasn’t created many scripted dramas capable of cutting through the noise. Some of its prestige efforts have simply been bad (Apples Never Fall), premiered at a time when subscribers’ attention was pulled elsewhere (Those About to Die coincided with the Paris Olympics), or, worse yet, were pretty good but never found a sizable audience (The Resort). It’s harder than ever for original shows to command attention when they aren’t available on Netflix or attached to big-name IP, so this isn’t a Peacock-specific problem. Still, it doesn’t bode well for future series, however good, if their popularity on the service feels so capped.
Could capitalizing on spooky season change things for the better? From classic Universal monster movies—and their modern remakes—to Blumhouse hits like Get Out and M3GAN, NBCUniversal has long been a reliable home for horror. (Not to mention, there are enough horror fanatics out there to support a niche streamer catering to their interests, so demand for this stuff exists.) If the majority of Peacock’s prestige swings aren’t connecting with audiences, perhaps genre projects can move the needle.
In the past two weeks, Peacock has put that theory to the test by premiering two high-profile horror series, Teacup and Hysteria!, which scratch a different itch within the genre. In the James Wan–produced Teacup, a ranch in rural Georgia becomes enveloped in a mysterious, invisible force field that traps its unlucky inhabitants, who soon realize they aren’t alone in the woods. No less an authority than Stephen King has praised Teacup as “all killer, no filler.” Meanwhile, Hysteria! takes place in small-town Michigan at the height of the ’80s satanic panic, as a high school heavy metal band exploits the cultural moment to rebrand and gain more followers—even if it puts a target on their back. (The series also boasts an ’80s horror icon in The Evil Dead’s Bruce Campbell, who plays the town’s police chief investigating a teenage boy’s disappearance.)
Between the two shows, Teacup is the one that holds plenty of promise. The mystery-box component of having characters trapped by sinister forces is a compelling hook, but the key to Teacup’s longevity is whether the biggest questions surrounding the series will deliver satisfying answers. Without giving too much away, I actually think Teacup would generate more buzz if audiences knew more about what iconic horror properties the show was aping and how they fit into the larger story, which is largely absent from the marketing. Long story short: If the idea of John Carpenter’s The Thing taking place on a rural farm sounds intriguing, Teacup is well worth a watch. (As one would expect given the Carpenter comp, Teacup boasts some gnarly body horror for all you sickos out there.)
Of course, The Thing is a tantalizing premise for single-location horror, but that makes it a better fit for a feature film rather than an eight-episode season of television. Teacup also has plenty of room for improvement, namely that its setup is far more interesting than any of the one-dimensional characters, who are mostly elevated by a talented ensemble that includes Yvonne Strahovski, Chaske Spencer, Scott Speedman, and Rob Morgan. The good news is that, should Teacup be renewed, its second season promises to have much bigger aspirations—expanding its scope to something more in the vein of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. But a series like Teacup needs an engaged audience to go along for the ride; a mystery box might not have a future if nobody wants to unpack it in the first place.
Whereas Teacup’s biggest problem is that the show’s most marketable elements are withheld from viewers, Hysteria! fully embraces its similarities to the pop culture properties that inspired it. With an emphasis on punk teens and how a community views them while satanic panic is in the air, Hysteria! feels like Stranger Things’ Eddie Munson subplot stretched out to the length of a series, especially when it’s implied there’s a demonic presence making its way into the town. (That said, the sinister vibes are less Upside Down and more upside-down crosses.)
Unfortunately, Hysteria! can’t quite decide what type of show it wants to be; story lines alternate between teens forming a satanic cult as a marketing stunt for their heavy metal band (fun!), a religious zealot dialing up paranoia among the locals (one-note and tiresome), and a mother (played by Julie Bowen) who fears something evil has rooted itself in her home (underdeveloped). For a horror series, Hysteria! also commits the cardinal sin of never being all that scary, even when characters are supposedly possessed or buried alive in a satanic ritual. It’s all a bit too unfocused—mildly creepy in one scene, mildly amusing in the next, always unsure of itself. As a result, Hysteria! is resigned to a fate that’s arguably worse than simply being bad: It’s forgettable.
Forgettable isn’t what Peacock needs out of an original series, especially when almost every streamer on the market can boast some brand-defining hits. For some subscribers, Peacock is already filling a need, whether it’s through an impressive collection of reality TV or live sports offerings unique to its platform. (As long as NBCUniversal holds the rights to the Premier League, I’ll remain a loyal user.) But if Peacock is going to maintain a steady level of interest amid so many options, it can’t just rely on special events like the Olympics that come and go in a flash. Peacock is still making some headway in the Streaming Wars, but when it comes to scripted series, the service could stand to ruffle more feathers.
In 2002, Donald Trump told Errol Morris that his favorite movie was Orson Welles’s 1941 classic Citizen Kane—an opinion that aligns surprisingly well with critical consensus. During the interview, Trump spoke candidly about Kane’s allegory of avarice and ambition, and where its story of a man trying to bend the world to his will intersected with his own legacy. He even offered a bit of passable formal analysis when discussing the famous sequence in which the protagonist’s self-imposed stint in domestic purgatory is visualized in a montage set entirely in his dining room. “The table getting larger, and larger, and larger, with [Kane] and his wife getting further and further apart as he got wealthier and wealthier … perhaps I can understand that,” Trump said. “I think you learn in [Citizen] Kane that maybe wealth isn’t everything. Because he had the wealth, but he didn’t have the happiness.”
The sinister relationship between extreme wealth and extreme depression, and how the latter can metastasize into an all-obliterating megalomania, is an enduring American theme, and it’s at the heart—such as it is—of Ali Abbasi’s new Donald Trump biopic, The Apprentice. The film, which premiered earlier this year at Cannes, has already incited predictable ire (and threats of litigation) on behalf of its namesake, as well as complaints from one of its own financiers pertaining to its content: When former Washington Commandersowner (and Trump donor) Dan Snyder saw a rough cut, he reportedly walked out of the screening room. For a while, the media narrative was that no U.S. distributor would touch The Apprentice because the material was just too dangerous; in June, New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg speculated that it would be suppressed for political reasons. Such well-publicized anxieties are usually just another form of hype, however, and the film is being released this week as a potential Oscar contender, as well as an election-season intervention against its antihero and his latest bid for the White House. The cinematic equivalent of an October surprise.
That most of the revelations in The Apprentice are already a matter of public record is beside the point. Scripted by Roger Ailes biographer Gabriel Sherman—a journalist making his screenwriting debut—the film has been styled, aggressively and unapologetically, as a tactically unflattering portrait-of-the-mogul-as-a-young-man. Instead of a full life-and-times epic, we get a carefully curated series of snapshots, set in the 1970s and ’80s against the backdrop of a rapidly gentrifying but spiritually dilapidated New York City, whose downtown core is seemingly ready and willing to be rebranded by a real estate mogul with the will to put his name on anything above street level. Enter the 27-year-old Donald Trump, who, as played by Sebastian Stan, is savvy and charismatic but also doughy and unformed. The narrative through line is his molding into a killer at the hands of the legendary lawyer and power broker Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong). Imagine Pygmalion with a literally porcine protégé.“You create your own reality,” Cohn tells his new client. “Truth is a malleable thing.”
The incalculable wreckage left in the wake of Cohn’s life and career—and the tragic, seismic schadenfreude of a virulent public homophobe succumbing to AIDS behind the doors of his own lavishly appointed private closet—was already dramatized by Tony Kushner in his Pulitzer Prize–winning play Angels in America,which inventoried the self-styled Cold Warrior’s résumé as one of the masterminds behind McCarthyism, as well as a principal bogeyman in the Lavender Scare. That Sherman has brazenly borrowed his own script’s mentor-student dynamic—as well as the desolate poignancy of Cohn becoming a piece of collateral damage in his own scorched-earth prejudice—from Angels in America is perhaps fair enough: One of the functions of great works is to inspire variations.
It’s also fair enough to think that, after providing decades of fodder for irony-mongers like Spy magazine and Saturday Night Live, a figure as monolithic as Trump warrants his own pop-Mephistophelean origin story à la Citizen Kane—a movie sufficiently weaponized to take the once (and future?) president down to size. But when Welles took on the right-wing newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst, he had plenty of stylistic ammunition. Welles was one of the greatest film artists who ever lived—a prodigy with the skill to make every mock-heroic close-up and muscle-flexing tracking shot count. When he showed the title character (played with bristling charisma by the director himself) refracted in a hall of mirrors, the image crystallized the concept of a man who contained multitudes while also being profoundly ordinary. It wasn’t just Charles Foster Kane that Welles had in his sights, but a culture where the ability to reproduce and project identity into infinity could potentially make demagogues of us all.
That Ali Abbasi isn’t Orson Welles is, once again, fair enough. But after watching the ugly misfire of The Apprentice—a movie as slovenly and obvious as Citizen Kane is sophisticated and spacious, and which makes even the 2016 Funny or Die short “The Art of the Deal”look like, well, Citizen Kane—the question remains: How the fuck do you miss a target as wide as Donald Trump?
There are few things more depressing than a cheap-shot artist who thinks he’s a marksman, which was the main takeaway from Abbasi’s previous feature, Holy Spider, a fact-based account of a serial killer preying on Iranian sex workers that trafficked in morbid sensationalism while cloaking itself in the vestments of moralizing social commentary. The opening scenes of The Apprentice, meanwhile, suggest a filmmaker aiming squarely below the belt in both senses of the word: When Donald locks eyes with Roy across a crowded dining room at Le Club, it’s framed as a diabolical meet-cute between a pair of anti-soul-mates, each in love with the archetypal idea of the other. It would be one thing if Abbasi showed the ability—or even the desire—to get inside the mix of self-infatuation and self-loathing driving this incarnation of Trump, but the best he can do is compel us to gawk at the people on-screen with cozily vicarious disapproval, secure in the knowledge that they exist across some vast chasm of history and experience. By clearly demarcating the line between their characters and the audience, Abbasi and Sherman sidestep the demands of genuine art, or even the honest vulgarity of a director like Paul Verhoeven, whose RoboCop burlesqued the cutthroat misanthropy (and unscrupulously privatized skylines) of the Reagan ’80s in real time without any pretenses to awards-season prestige.
It may be that Sebastian Stan will find himself nominated for Best Actor early next year; hopefully it will be for his superlative work in Aaron Schimberg’s surreal comedy A Different Man, which channels the rage and alienation of a loner trapped in his own skin—and also the concept of New York as an emotionally parched hellscape—with exponentially more poetry and humor than The Apprentice. It’s not that Stan is bad, exactly. He plays the role as written, which is to say that he’s allowed to be (relatively) subtle in the first half of the narrative before swapping out any sense of naturalism for a collection of recognizable verbal and physical tics in the second. In theory, the performance is shaped around the idea that the version of Trump that’s come to dominate the public consciousness was gradually willed into being as a hybrid form of behavioral modification and performance art. But because Abbasi can’t abide anything like contradiction or complexity, the process doesn’t so much deepen the characterization as flatten it, stranding a gifted and resourceful performer in the no-man’s-land of sketch-comedy impersonation.
As for Strong, whose casting is shadowed by Al Pacino’s phenomenal portrayal of Cohn in the TV adaptation of Angels in America (as well as his role on Succession), he’s reached the point—endemic to being a certain kind of great actor—where the nobility of his commitment to the bit is, paradoxically, what keeps him from actually nailing it. The most extraordinary aspect of Strong’s presence on Succession was how he managed to convey how a person as emotionally fragile and psychologically transparent as Kendall Roy could still be a mystery to himself and the people around him. Whether trying to live up to his best ideas or succumbing to his worst impulses, you could register the wires crossing behind the character’s eyes. The impression was of an actor building a character from the ground up as well as the inside out, and capturing something true about the multiplicity of privileged pseudo-visionaries hovering above us: that their lack of conviction gives them an ethical permission slip to support the most noxious causes imaginable (remember that Kendall’s flight jacket get-up while pitching “Living+” was based on Elon Musk). The difference with Roy Cohn, of course, is that he was a rabid, unrepentant ideologue—closer in spirit, if not self-presentation, to Logan Roy—and the only thing Strong can do with his interpretation of the role is clobber it (and us) so that every scene feels like he’s working a speed bag—a show of exertion that only intermittently syncs with Cohn’s own notorious showmanship.
Beyond Stan and Strong’s strained double act, The Apprentice doesn’t have much going on at the margins; the ostensible emotional impact of the scenes depicting Donald’s courtship of, and progressively dysfunctional marriage to, the late Ivana Zelnickova (Maria Bakalova) is undermined by the same faux-austere grandstanding that marred the putative anti-misogyny of Holy Spider. Abbasi and Sherman clearly care less about what happened to Ivana than the fact that depicting incidents of psychological, physical, and sexual abuse helps them cinch what’s already an open-and-shut case against her husband. That same attitude pervades the film’s presentation of the social, cultural, and political realities surrounding Trump’s rise to power, which resorts to the laziest kind of shorthand—i.e., a brief cutaway to an irate Black man decrying Trump’s racist attitudes after a group of compromised city planners grant the latter rights to refurbish the Commodore Hotel—instead of trying to work through the attitudes that made such predatory, discriminatory practices possible. Instead of contextualizing Trump and Cohn’s relationship in the larger context of a nationwide swing to the right, The Apprentice simply inventories their monstrous actions (and appetites) while feigning clear-eyed impartiality. It’s one thing to craft a fable about bad men insulating themselves from the consequences of their actions beneath impenetrably stratified layers of wealth; it’s another to make a movie that feels trapped in a similarly hollow sort of echo chamber, saying the same basic thing over and over again until the volume and the redundancy become integrated on a molecular level.
Near the climax of the film, Abbasi gives us the hypothetically potent spectacle of Stan lying supine and unconscious on an operating table during a nip-and-tuck—a clinical yet grotesque image that’s supposed to be the movie’s trump card. It is, indeed, a perfect visual metaphor. But only because it confirms The Apprentice as a purely cosmetic exercise, slicing away futilely at Donald Trump while ultimately confirming his indestructibility.
Adam Nayman is a film critic, teacher, and author based in Toronto; his book The Coen Brothers: This Book Really Ties the Films Together is available now from Abrams.
Two years ago, Entree introduced itself to Chicago, taking over the South Loop space where the city’s only Michelin-starred restaurant south of Roosevelt stood. Entree delivered meal kits, searching for a sweet spot for folks fed up with fees and mistakes from third-party couriers and restaurant customers who missed eating out during the pandemic. As the business grew, its owners knew they had an asset in their dining room. They threw pop-ups and opened the bar area earlier this year while unveiling a new name for on-premise dining, Oliver’s.
In late August the time finally arrived as Oliver’s dining room finally debuted. The added real estate will give Oliver’s chef Alex Carnovale more room to play. He’s already established a menu of favorites including roast chicken, a burger, and diver scallops. The French Laundry alum has shown his ambitions while developing the menus for Entree’s delivery side. With Oliver’s, Carnovale no longer has to worry about whether his food will survive a car ride.
The space is warmer, with a supper club feeling that presents a departure from the modern vibe of the previous tenant. Specifically, Oliver’s was going for a 1930s speakeasy feel. It’s a comfy place to enjoy truffle gnocchi or tomato risotto. As the bar opened first, the drink program had time to mature under the leadership of Luke DeYoung who worked a Sepia and Scofflaw. A gin martini is garnished with caviar-stuffed olive. There are non-alcoholic options, and a deep wine list, too. Happy hour specials have already launched, and bar snacks include Italian beef popcorn, cheddar fries, and beef-fat griddled sourdough from Publican Quality Bread. The latter is served with whipped parmesan and steak sauce.
Walk through the space below. Oliver’s dining room is now open.
Oliver’s, 1930 S. Wabash Avenue, open 5 p.m. to 10 p.m., Tuesday through Saturday, reservations via Tock.
There’s a video I return to often. Posted just over 10 years ago by an essentially defunct blog called Houston Hip-Hop Fix, it shows Rich Homie Quan in a blue Argentina soccer kit and at least five necklaces. Quan and the interviewer are bathed off and on in the strobing red light of a cop car. There’s one microphone, so Quan and the host step on one another’s thoughts, deferring politely and shrugging apologies. The rapper runs through the sort of light mythmaking that marks all these interviews: Yes, the debut album is coming; no, no more free mixtapes; yes, music runs through my veins; no, I never touch pen to paper.
About 90 seconds into the clip, Quan starts talking about his relationship with Young Thug. He says they have unique chemistry in the studio, more boilerplate stuff. But a minute later––after a clumsy jump cut in the video—Quan says that he and Thug are going to release an EP. Most definitely, the interviewer says. Any plans on when that’s gonna drop? “Before the year’s out,” Quan replies. The interviewer asks whether he’d be willing to reveal the title. Quan declines, but he strokes his goatee, looks for a second into the camera––something he hasn’t done to this point––and raps his hand on the interviewer’s forearm for emphasis. “I can tell you this,” he says. “The EP me and Thug [are going to] drop? The hardest duo since Outkast.” The interviewer’s eyes widen. He starts to push back (“Now that’s—”), but Quan cuts him off. “I’m not being funny.” He presses. “I’m not putting too much on it. Hardest duo since Outkast.”
Quan, who passed away Thursday, one month before his 34th birthday, was always doing this: cocooning the audacious within a thick layer of charm and humility. He was a born hitmaker whose commercial career was compromised by record label issues, contractual lawsuits, and the industry’s uneven evolution over the course of the 2010s. Like Dre, Big Boi, and a host of other Southern pioneers, Quan wrote songs that smartly synthesized formal experimentation and personal introspection—with each new, clipped flow or harmonized aside, he seemed to burrow deeper into his own psyche. He leaves behind four sons.
Quan was born Dequantes Devontay Lamar in 1990 and was raised in Atlanta, where, as a teenager, he excelled as a center fielder and student of literature. He was less successful in a short-lived burglary career, which led to a 15-month bid shortly after he dropped out of Fort Valley State University. “It really sat me down and opened my eyes,” Quan told XXLof his time inside.
The first things you’d notice about his music were the titles. In 2012, Quan released his first mixtape, I Go In on Every Song, a promise on which it very nearly delivers. Early the following year, he earned his national breakthrough on the back of “Type of Way,” which made him sound a little mean and a little sensitive, and also like he nearly drowned in a vat of charisma as a small child. (That single was issued to iTunes by Def Jam, which seemed to indicate that Quan had signed to the label; in fact, he would remain locked in litigation with a smaller company, Think It’s a Game Entertainment, for many years.)
“Type of Way” came out as Future was pulling rap radio into his orbit, and it was seen by some early listeners as a variation on that Plutonic style. But in its verses, Quan skews much closer to traditional modes of rapping, using his melodic skills to augment the song rather than anchor it. It functions as an extended taunt—sometimes menacing, other times merely playful. Boasts that he can spot undercover cops with a single glance enjamb against lines like “I got a hideaway, and I go there sometimes / To give my mind a break”; memories of served subpoenas are delivered in delicate singsong. All of this knottiness and seeming contradiction is in fact corralled by Quan until it propels the song in a single direction with irrepressible momentum.
There were more titles, more hits: Still Goin In, the Gucci Mane collaboration Trust God Fuck 12, I Promise I Will Never Stop Going In. “Walk Thru,” a duet with the Compton rapper Problem (now Jason Martin), is a slick song about collecting inflated club appearance fees that nevertheless sounds like it was spawned in a nightmare. The hook he gifted to YG in 2013 helped get the regional star off the shelf at Def Jam and onto national radio for the first time. And in 2015, when he went triple platinum with his single “Flex (Ooh, Ooh, Ooh),” he did so by distilling his style more cleanly than ever before. That song is wobbly and joyous, making rote descriptions of money earned sound like tiny spiritual breakthroughs.
All the while, his early collaborator was on his own star trajectory. Both Thug and Quan were dogged by conservative reactions to their work. It would be a couple of years before “mumble rap” was in wide use as a pejorative, but they were, predictably, seen by some resistant listeners as uninteresting writers or inadequate vocalists. Both charges were and are rooted in ideological opposition to their styles rather than earnest evaluations of their music. But even for the initiated, Quan’s suggestion that whatever he and Thug were working on would cement them as better than the Clipse or Black Star, better than Webbie and Boosie or Dead Prez or whomever, seemed improbable.
What they delivered, in September 2014, was at once bigger and smaller than anyone could have expected, seismic but nearly invisible. The tour that Tha Tour, Pt. 1 was meant to promote never really materialized; some of the Cash Money albums teased during DJ drops would be held up in labyrinthine court cases for another half decade, if they were released at all. The terrible, sub–Microsoft Paint cover dubbed the group Rich Gang, a moniker that had already been used for Baby’s other post–Cash Money branding exercises. “Lifestyle,” the massive summer hit Thug and Quan had scored under the name, wasn’t even included. Tha Tour does not exist on streaming platforms and did not spawn any new hits. But it was as Quan promised: a perfect snapshot of two eccentrics searching manically for new veins to tap. The hardest duo since Outkast.
You could credibly argue that Tha Tour is the best rap record of the 2010s. It captures Thug, one of the decade’s true supernova talents, near or at his apex—yet it would be very reasonable to suggest that Quan gets the better of him. See Quan’s verse on the shimmering “Flava,” where he shouts, buoyant, about his son inheriting his features, then makes the act of allowing a girlfriend to count his money seem more tender than any other intimate moment. Or take the harrowing “Freestyle,” its title belying the depth of thought and passion that Quan brings to the song. “My baby mama just put me on child support,” he raps:
Fuck a warrant, I ain’t going to court Don’t care what them white folks say, I just wanna see my lil boy Go to school, be a man, and sign up for college, boy Don’t be a fool, be a man, what you think that knowledge for?
On Thursday, shortly after Quan’s passing was confirmed, Quavo, one of the two surviving members of Migos, posted an Instagram story. “Good Convo With My Bro,” he wrote over a black background, and tagged Offset, with whom he’d been locked in a very public feud since shortly before their group mate Takeoff was killed in November 2022. Ten years ago, it seemed this cohort of Atlanta rappers was going to rule the industry indefinitely; today, the deaths of artists including Quan, Takeoff, Trouble, Lil Keed, and Bankroll Fresh—as well as Young Thug’s ongoing RICO trial—hang like a dark cloud over one of music’s creative meccas.
After “Flex,” Quan’s career ceased to be supported as it could or should have been by record companies; whether because of the Think It’s a Game situation, bad taste, or a lack of marketing imagination, he never again got the push he deserved. (He also never worked with Thug again: In interviews about the topic, Quan was reflective and self-critical, though some of the particulars of their falling-out may now be the concern of the Georgia justice system.) His best solo album, 2017’s thoughtful, technically virtuosic Back to the Basics, was swallowed entirely by Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN, which was surprise released on the same day.
The 2019 film Uncut Gems is typical of its directors’ output. Josh and Benny Safdie are obsessed with verisimilitude—even their most outlandish scenes are populated with nonprofessional actors, their dialogue overlapping, the blocking evolving naturally, the immersion in each character’s world totally ethnographic. Gems takes place during the 2012 NBA playoffs, and the period details are managed with fastidiousness. The lone concession seems to come about halfway through, when LaKeith Stanfield’s character pulls his SUV up to a curb, playing “Type of Way” at a deafening volume. While that song wouldn’t come out until the year after the Celtics’ run, the filmmakers evidently felt that fracturing their reality was worth it for its punishing effect. This, in so many ways, sums up Quan’s career: unstuck in time ever so slightly, caught between eras, yet still, on the most fundamental level, undeniable.
Paul Thompson is the senior editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books. His work has appeared in Rolling Stone, New York magazine, and GQ.
Picking up dog poo isn’t anyone’s favorite activity (not that we’ve come across anyway), but it is a necessary must. And we’re trusting that everyone in Austin, and beyond, understands that this is a dirty job that can’t be ignored.
FACT: A pet resource center is NOT the same as an animal shelter; however, it does include animal sheltering as a component of the services offered. In a traditional animal sheltering model, the animal shelter is where pets are taken to get any kind of resources or help, but is not usually the best solution.
It’s been a year since scintillating South Asian restaurant Vajra moved from West Town into the Wicker Park space where to Spring and Trencherman called home. But until last week, the restaurant was take-out only as ownership worked out what it wanted to do inside their new home near Wicker Park’s six corners.
Last weekend Vajra began bar service. They’ll serve cocktails and bar bites like momos and a goat burger. But the big news for fans of Vajra’s delectable dishes like Sichuan Chicken Chili, Goan Shrimp Curry, and malai kofta is that the dining room will finally debut to the public on Thursday, August 1. Reservations are live via Tock.
Restablishing the bar means a reunion with star bartender Juanjo Pulgarin. Vajra specializes in Nepali and Indian cuisine, with the two countries diverging but coming from the same culinary traditions. But until recently, South Asian restaurants in America didn’t focus too much on cocktails. Liquor licenses are expensive, especially for the first wave of immigrant restaurant owners. There are also cultural taboos surrounding alcohol in some South Asian communities.
Juanjo PulgarinAshok Selvam/Eater Chicago
But not everyone carries those old-school traditions, and often time dissolves those binds. Pulgarin, who is Colombian and grew up in Spain, thrilled customers with a high-end program utilizing mixology tricks and ingredients seen at fancy cocktail bars. That earned Pulgarin a 2020 Jean Banchet Award nomination for best bartender. But as management closed Vajra’s dining room and bar during the pandemic, Pulgarin left Vajra and is now the lead bartender at Gold Coast steakhouse Maple & Ash where he’s helping the company relaunch its 8 Bar to open more locations across the country.
Pulgarin’s drinks include a riff on mango lassi, called Xanadu y El Cielo. Lassi, a non-alcoholic drink famous in northern India, is known for its viscous texture. When served traditionally it’s akin to a cheesecake milkshake and it comes in sweet or savory versions. Vajra’s version captures the flavor without the thickness, creating a light drink made with whisky, amaro, nixta, yogurt, coconut milk, mango, and citrus. Pulgarin loves the looks of drinkers expecting the traditional take and seeing their surprise when they see and taste his version. Another drink, Sakura Garden, is made with gin, sake, watermelon, saffron, lychee, and lime. Pulgarin helped create the menu and he’s close with management so he can pursue other projects, like Maple & Ash, while contributing to Vajra.
When Vajra opened in 2019, they were ahead of the South Asian cocktail revolution. This was before Lilac Tiger and Kama opened.
Co-owner Dipesh Kakshapaty says his team was worried that folks would want a full at the bar and that’s why they scaled back. They served a version of the goat burger in the past, as many restaurants pivoted to simpler food during the pandemic because of to-go operations — It’s also cheaper from a labor standpoint. The burger’s return made sense as Vajra builds out its bar menu.
It’s been a journey since 2020 when the restaurant shifted to takeout and delivery-only, pushed by the pandemic, and then challenges at their original location, 1329 W. Chicago Avenue — now home to Jook Sing — prevent them from reopening. Vajra closed in January 2022 but some members of ownership pursued a new restaurant venture but that never gained much traction. It would reopen for takeout and delivery in September 2022 inside the same West Town location. They moved to Wicker Park nine months later.
The previous tenant, Ooh Wee It Is, never opened — despite putting up signs. That stretch of Wicker Park has been tough to crack, but Vajra hopes a hearty cocktail program, an established takeout and delivery business, and some of the best Indian and Nepali food in town can create a sustainable operation.
Vajra, 2039 W. North Avenue, bar open now, dining room opening Thursday, August 1, reservations via Tock.
QXY, one of Chicago’s most popular restaurants for Chinese dumplings, is opening a location inside Time Out Market. It is one of three additions to the Fulton Market food hall. 2d Restaurant, known for its mochi doughnuts and comic book-style interior design in Lakeview, will soon arrive. So will Libanais, a Lebanese restaurant in suburban Lincolnwood.
The dumplings will arrive first, according to a news release. QXY, which stands for Qing Xiang Yuan, will open on Wednesday, July 17. It replaces Avli, the Greek restaurant that plans to open a standalone location in the area. The menu at QXY includes steamed or fried dumplings stuffed with a choice of kurobuta pork and cabbage; shrimp, kurobuta, and pork leek; wagyu beef and black truffle; or chicken and mushroom. Soup dumplings will also be available, as will sides and salads.
Libanais will follow at the end of the month. Beef and lamb or chicken shawarma with fries; rotisserie beef and lamb with sumac onion wrapped in pita are some of the menu options. It replaces Evette’s.
2d, which also has a location at the vegan XMarket food hall — off DuSable Lake Shore Drive’s Montrose exit in Uptown‚ will bring its doughnuts, Vietnamese coffee, ube milk, and more to Fulton Market. It replaces Firecakes.
Food halls have been volatile in recent years since the pandemic. Revival Food Hall recently announced a “closure” — 16” on Center, the company that opened and operated the space, will soon be replaced by an Atlanta company, STHRN Hospitality. The new operators will seemingly retain most of the current vendors and rename the food hall. Urbanspace, near Daley Plaza, has been renamed Washington Hall as the New York company that founded that venue has left the business.
Time Out Market, which falls under the same umbrella as the publication that covers restaurants in Chicago, opened in 2019. They run food halls all over the world, including in Lisbon, Cape Town, and Montreal. The U.S. cities consist of Boston, New York, and Chicago.
Now empty dog bed. Had to put down my 14 y.o dog I raised from puppy ’cause of tumor. Decided that it’s better to let go instead of trying surgery that most likely would’ve been fatal anyway ’cause of old age. Now my other dog is searching for his cousin frantically without avail.
Wildermyth is an incredible procedurally generated RPG that leads players through a series of narrative quests. As you build bases, battle foes, and learn more about the world, you’re able to build up your cast with new decisions and sacrifices. A hero might die, marry another party member and have children, or turn into an increasingly feral beast. It’s a tremendously cozy, satisfying RPG experience.
Wildermyth has a core campaign, and additional adventurers that introduce new stories and new enemy factions. The game’s first DLC pack was focused around new cosmetic skins and armors for heroes, whereas the upcoming Omenroad expansion includes a roguelike-style challenge mode and a new story campaign called Walk in the Unlight. While Omenroad brings lots of new bosses and challenging fights, it also represents an end to development for Wildermyth. Worldwalker Games announced the conclusion on May 29 on the game’s official X account.
“We will continue to support the game and fix critical bugs, but don’t expect new content going forward,” co-owner Nate Austin wrote. “We will be saying farewell to many of our team members. Worldwalker Games is going into hibernation for now.”
Austin clarifies that the team still intends to port Wildermyth to other platforms, and the hibernation does not affect that “in any way.” He also commits to continuing a Kickstarter that will record the game’s music live and integrate it into the game, French and Spanish translations for Omenroad, and to maintain the game’s Discord, wiki, support email, merch store, and social media.
“Wildermyth has been wonderful, but nothing goes on forever,” wrote Austin. “We wanted to ship Omenroad, and having done that, we’re ready to move on. This was the plan, and it doesn’t have anything to do with how well Omenroad is doing. (It’s doing well! We’re extremely proud of it.)”
He added, “I’m pretty sure we’ll eventually find something else to pour our passion into, and we’ll let you know about it when the time comes.”
It’s sad to see an end to Wildermyth, which has become one of my staples when I want to play a narrative RPG adventure. But it’s also a tremendous game, and it’s good to see the studio end on a high note and walk away from the project of their own choice. While we may never see another title from the Worldwalker team, I’ll treasure Wildermyth and the stories it effortlessly spins for years to come.
The Sympathizer is full of twists and turns — and why wouldn’t it be? It’s a show (based on a book of the same name by Viet Thanh Nguyen) that follows a Viet Cong double agent from the end of the Vietnam War to life as a refugee in America as he works to secure the Viet Cong’s victory. All the while, the show wrestles with themes of self and identity, as filtered through The Captain (Hoa Xuande), said double agent; his Vietnamese community in 1970s Los Angeles; and the variety of white men he works for (all played by Robert Downey Jr.).
In the final episode, we finally catch up with The Captain’s present-day story in a reeducation camp in Vietnam, led by the shadowy Commissar, who’s been demanding the Captain’s story be written out in exacting detail. It’s no surprise that the true name of the Commissar — another figure defined by his title more than himself— would be another surprise in the plot. But, like any unveiling of true identity in The Sympathizer, it’s more a twist of the knife than anything else.
[Ed. note: The rest of this post contains spoilers for the end of The Sympathizer. This post also has some mentions of sexual assault.]
Photo: Hopper Stone/HBO
In the final episode, the Captain finds out the Commissar is in fact his friend Mẫn, now scarred from napalm strikes during the fall of Saigon. Worse yet, this old friend/prison camp supervisoris still going to torture him for information.
It’s a tough way for the Captain to find out that his visions of Mẫn — alone in an office and highly decorated, leading the bright future for Vietnam — weren’t accurate. Throughout the show, the Captain’s reflections were a neat framing device and something he saw as mostly a formality, the one thing standing between him and the bright future of Communist Vietnam he had fought so hard for. Now, staring him in the face, is the cold reality of what his struggle has culminated in. It’s all in keeping with the way The Sympathizer has been using the Captain’s imaginative visions as specters of his subjective (and warped) point of view.
“The ghosts really pertain to his consciousness, his conscience about his actions,” Xuande told Polygon. “The Captain’s journey is really about trying to survive, trying to weave his way out, and trying to never be found out, and, obviously, toeing the line between his allegiances.”
In that light, his vision with Mẫn isn’t all that different from his visions of Sonny or the Major; they’re all, as Xuande puts it, an expression of “the trauma that he’s been hiding from.” They’re a startling way for the Captain to realize that his actions have been more about finding any means to survive than about following his communist ideals, or fighting for a better Vietnam.
“When they come back to haunt and remind him about the very things he’s been neglecting in his memory, it’s a reminder for him that everything that he believes and thought he was doing for the cause might not actually be right.”
This is an idea that The Sympathizer underlines again and again with the Captain’s character: Nothing about his life is straightforward or neat, and none of it went the way he planned. Even as he seems to confess to Sonny or carry out the general’s orders to kill him, the Captain is acting for his own reasons, rather than purely “the cause.”
Photo: Hopper Stone/HBO
Such corruption of idealistic impulses is something Mẫn also knows all too well, seemingly disillusioned with the state of the country at the same time he does his job. He is, as his dual character names speak to, a different person now, much harder than he was as a spy under American imperialism. But (much like Downey Jr.’s parade of white authority figures) Duy Nguyễn wanted to make sure you could see the connective tissue between every version of Mẫn.
“To develop this character, I had to really dig deep: What is Mẫn? How does he talk? How does he move? How does he act around his friend, or does he act alone with just the Captain?” Nguyễn says. “He’s the dentist, so he’s very still; he has to be precise. And he’s intellectual, so he has to stay upright. The way he talks is clear — so those are the parts I keep.
“[In episode 7], he is so damaged, but he still wants to keep the presence in front of his friends. He just wants to try to be the same person his friend saw the last time.”
Which is crucial; all of episode 7 — and the crux of The Sympathizer’s final turn — comes down to how Mẫn’s turn plays. He is the single person, the crucial vector point, around which the Captain’s story gets suddenly jerked back, calling his bluffs and calling out all his perspective gaps. Like the Captain, he is a study of dualities: a person and a rank; loyal to the cause, yet wary; a ghost from the past and a vision of the brave new fractured and corrupted world. After filtering so much of the narrative — and, with it, the war, its aftershocks, and all the complexities contained within those — through the Captain’s identity, Mẫn is the only one who can match and cut through the noise of the story the Captain has been telling himself.
And the truth is at once infinitely more complex and far simpler than he was prepared to believe. Through his torture, the Captain finally reconciles with some of the worst things he did for the war, going all the way back to one of the earliest scenes of the show (that we now know was actually the rape of a fellow Communist agent). He has to accept who he is and where he comes from. And he has to accept that nothing about his trauma and suffering has necessarily fixed his nation. All that hardship might’ve just borne more pain — or, worse, indifference to pain. As the sexually assaulted Communist agent tells him, after all her years in the war and the camp, “nothing can disappoint” her now.
In the end, it’s Mẫn who gets the Captain (and Bon) free of the camp, back on a boat headed for the ol’ U.S. of A. It once again makes him a study in conflict; after so many years of loving (and trying to hate) that place, it might be his salvation after all. As the Captain looks back on Vietnam, he now sees a nation of ghosts — more clearly than ever.
It’s “tearin’ up our hearts” to see so many pets waiting to find a family of their very own all across the Austin area! So, in honor of Justin Timberlake’s unofficial “It’s Gonna Be May” month, Austin area shelters are working together to get pets into loving homes — “no strings attached.” Join us May 20th-27th to meet all of the pets vying to win your heart and who “just wanna be with you!”
In honor of Volunteer Appreciation Week, we asked a volunteer, Anish
K. to share their own personal experience as an APA! Volunteer. Anish’s
APA! Volunteer journey began 1.5 years ago!
[Ed. note: This post contains spoilers for the end of Shōgun.]
Just before he’s forced to commit seppuku in the final moments of Shōgun, Yabushige demands to know how Toranaga’s plan to overthrow Ishido will play out. At this moment, Shōgun shows us a glimpse of tens of thousands of soldiers across five armies amassed on a battlefield. The entire series has seemingly been building up to this point — the training of the cannon regiment, Toranaga’s half-brother shifting his alliance, the Regents all signing a declaration of war — and yet just before the battle is set to begin, Ishido is delivered a note letting him know that the heir’s army will abstain from the battlefield. Without the heir’s banner, the other Regents will turn on him before the battle even begins. But this is just Toranaga’s plan; Shōgun never actually shows us any war.
It’s subversive never to have any war in a historical war epic, with Toranaga’s subversion delaying his impeachment vote (and any declaration of war) until the ninth episode. Most movies or TV shows in the genre set up the narrative to give the viewer a satisfying and violent conclusion to the tension that’s been building, like the final stand in TheReturn of the King, the faceoff in Braveheart, or even the last stand of The Last Samurai (which is also about a Western military man landing in Japan, and shares some crew with Shōgun). In essence, no matter how brutal and bloody the fight is, an explosive battlefield is the natural climax to the story arc. These movies and shows also often land on one implied conclusion: War, no matter how disgusting it may be, is a justified, even virtuous endeavor.
But while the war genre often posits a “good side” to root for over the evil one, Shōgun complicates the conception with Toranaga, who spends most of the series plotting in the background toward an alliance with key adversaries rather than preparing to fight them. Toranaga is cunning, ruthless, and willing to sacrifice his closest friends if it means he can avoid an all-out war. His motivations are what make Shōgun such a compelling show — while at the same time forcing audiences to reexamine their expectations of a historical war epic.
For Toranaga in Shōgun, there’s only one evil side: war itself. In his final speech to Yabushige, Toranaga describes his dream: “A nation without wars. An era of great peace.” Key to his calculus, however, is his willingness to sacrifice those dearest to him to achieve this peace. From the moment Ochiba returned to Osaka, Toranaga had been prepping Mariko (and her thoughts about death) to make a final appeal to gain allegiance from the heir’s army. And, knowing since the pilot that Yabushige was bound to betray him, Toranaga’s orchestration of Mariko’s sacrifice was his personal trolley problem — only in his version, the question is between sacrificing one life or setting 10,000 trolleys against another 10,000 trolleys on the same tracks.
Photo: Katie Yu/FX
Photo: Katie Yu/FX
In other shows, this setup wouldn’t quite work. Audiences are used to war being a mass of bodies hacking and slashing and shooting each other with the idea that sacrifice is necessary and just as long as both parties are armed. Individual deaths of beloved characters, however, are usually framed as the face for the heaps of lost lives. But Mariko walked into Osaka with a plan. With how close she came to committing seppuku, her sacrifice is likely one of the potential outcomes of the plan she discussed with Toranaga. When she willingly absorbs the blast of the bomb through the door, it’s absolutely heart-wrenching for the viewer and Blackthorne. His grief on screen, along with Father Alvito’s and Buntaro’s, is devastating to see unfold in the finale. In most media properties, the audience would walk away wishing the character was saved in time from their terrible fate, forced to be content with the revenge in their name. In Shōgun, we’re asked to accept her decision and not demand a bloodbath as retribution.
In this light, Toranaga seems ruthlessly Machiavellian, since he seems perfectly fine with innocent death. When Uejiro the gardener removes the rotting pheasant and is put to death by the village as a smokescreen to protect his spy, Toranaga treats Blackthorne’s distress as childish. Similarly, when the Erasmus is sunk at the end of the series, Toranaga routs the whole town of Ajiro, sticking severed heads of fishermen on a sign as punishment for the destruction of the boat — even though it was he, personally, who hired the men who spread gunpowder across the deck of Blackthorne’s beloved ship. Even his son’s graceless death is only audibly acknowledged by Toranaga as a way to buy time and delay the oncoming war.
Avoiding war seems to be Toranaga’s top priority throughout the series, though he never fully states it outright until his final confrontation with Yabushige. Throughout the show, he declines to share his feelings publicly, instead letting other characters in his council lead discussions — even if he’s manipulating their moves from behind the scenes. When his oldest friend and advisor threatens seppuku, Toranaga stands by his decision to surrender to Osaka, knowing that Hiromatsu’s death will set his battle-averse plans in motion. Even in his final interaction with Yabushige, who demands to know if Toranaga plans to reinstate the shogunate, triggering a return to a single military ruler for all of Japan, he forgoes the chance to monologue: “Why tell a dead man the future?”
Shōgun is sparing but decisive about the horrors of war that Toranaga wants to avoid. Violence is efficiently brutal in the world of the show. Even in the flashback to Toranaga’s early glory days, Shōgun is careful not to valorize war or his part in it; while his own soldiers brutally behead fallen enemies lying in bloody piles of limbs on the battlefield, a young Toranaga looks on, unwavering in his demeanor. Threatened by the arrival of Ishido’s main man Nebara Jozen in episode 4, Toranaga’s son Nagakado makes the rash decision to unload their newly minted cannon regiment on the interlopers. As the cannons in the distance roar, the camera cuts quickly to Jozen, his men, and their horses being torn to shreds in some of the goriest effects put to television. While there is a fair amount of swordplay skirmishes throughout the series, this cannon demonstration is one of the only depictions we get of mass warfare, and the results are truly terrifying. Amid the viscera, the audience can actually hear the feet of Nagakado’s men squelch in the blood-soaked mud as they creep in to finish everyone off. Compared to the hand-to-hand combat we’ve seen in the woods, where men drop from a single slash or stab, this preview of war is significantly more gruesome, particularly when you add in the full rifle regiments.
Photo: Katie Yu
Shōgun is careful to avoid the glorious charge into battle, upending the viewer’s relationship to political struggle. When Hiromatsu commits seppuku to protest Toranaga’s surrender to Osaka, he does so to prevent Toranaga’s other generals from sparking their own uprising. Toranaga clearly wants to stop him but can’t, the way Hiromatsu would do anything for him and must. Later, Toranaga reveals that he knew Hiromatsu’s actions would spark Yabushige and Blackthorne to head to Osaka on their own, which allows him to send Mariko with them as part of his true plan. Toranaga’s pained stoicism in this scene is revealing, and the tears in his eyes are the first time viewers see his facade crack. Even if Toranaga carries the weight of every death in service to his cause, he’s still unwavering in his ultimate goal.
That brings us back to Mariko’s standoff at the Osaka castle gates. As she tries to fight her way forward with her naginata, she’s relentlessly beaten back by Ishido’s men. After her defeat, she declares her intention to commit seppuku publicly for not being able to fulfill Toranaga’s orders, and it’s that moment that primes Ishido to release the Regents and their royal court as hostages — not her actual fight. In her actual fight, just before she picks up her own polearm, we see the pointless death of her armed escorts again and again as Ishido’s men slaughter them. Even when it looks like they may turn the tide, Mariko’s guards are cut down by arrows from men stationed on the castle walls. The battle is over in seconds, ending with one of Toranaga’s men bowing to Mariko while being speared directly through the heart from behind.
It’s hard to ignore the message of intentional protest by death. For those not directly involved, war — particularly period warfare like Shōgun — tends to be a tragedy that occurs in a faraway place, out of sight and out of mind. Even if her men remain nameless, Mariko’s sacrifice instead places tragedy immediately on the doorstep of Japan’s capital in the most unavoidable way possible. When looking to calculate what the cost of war is, it’s no longer a tally of nameless soldiers dying far away. It’s now the immediate loss of someone everyone in the show — and of course, the audience — holds dear to their hearts.
And the audience spends the entire last episode dealing with Blackthrone’s grief and acceptance. Shōgun defies the natural story arc by ending with a whimper; it’s in that precise moment of audience discomfort that viewers are forced to reckon with how much they want to see violence play out on screen, and perhaps even contend with how readily they are willing to accept war in real life.
In a way, Shōgun is both a critique of war and of the media’s portrayal of it. But the show is always clear that every decision demands some sort of sacrifice. “It’s hypocrisy, our lives,” Yabushige states, cliffside, as Toranaga draws his sword to second his seppuku. “All this death and sacrifice from lesser men just to ensure some victory in our names…” Yabushige in this moment exists almost as an analog for the audience, questioning Toranaga’s methods. “If you win, anything is possible,” Toranaga replies, echoing a sentiment uttered by Blackthorne earlier. And winning, Shōgun seems to imply, can happen before war even breaks out.
In the 54-year history of Pequod’s Pizza, a white pie has allegedly never appeared on the menu. The deep-dish pizzeria, with locations in Lincoln Park and suburban Morton Grove, is known for its savory caramelized rings of crust that surround the pie. The sausage and pepperoni are the top sellers, but no matter personal preference — even pineapple — the popular pizzeria has never regularly offered a pie without tomato sauce, according to Pequod’s management.
Home cook Billy Zureikat is about to change that, offering a deep-dish version of his Tripping Billy pizza every Wednesday in May at Pequod’s in Lincoln Park. Zureikat, known in Chicago’s culinary circles as “Billy Z,” has raised $50,000 to support the Muscular Dystrophy Association through various Tripping Billy pop-ups at Chicago restaurants like Paulie Gee’s, Bang Bang Pie, and Pizza Matta. Those he’s deviated from pizza — he’s sold sandwiches at Tempesta Market, for example — he incorporates a creamy shishito pepper sauce, corn, mozzarella, cheddar, and pickled jalapeños into a special with proceeds going to MDA.
Billy Zureikat (right) and Pequod’s assistant general manager Brian Kaminski.
Tripping Billy is a kind of alter ego for Zureikat. It took doctors eight years to provide a proper reason for why he would trip and fall while playing basketball. Healthcare professionals would later diagnose him with limb-girdle muscular dystrophy. A rabid sports fan unable to play basketball due to the rare disease, Zureikat poured his passion into baking. The idea for the pizza came after a few summer visits to farmers markets where he came away with a horde of shishitos. He turned them into a cream sauce which serves as a base for his pizza. He held a pop-up at Paulie Gee’s Pizza in Logan Square in 2021 and has been rolling since, tapping into his contacts from his former gig working radio for ESPN Chicago, WMVP 1000.
Customers wanting to taste the Tripping Billy at Pequod’s can stop by or call the pizzeria on Wednesdays starting on May 1 to make a carryout order. The two parties are hopeful of expanding their partnership on other days, but that depends on the demand. Check Zureikat’s Instagram page for more updates.
Pequod’s x Billy Z pop-up for carryout, every Wednesday through May.
A shishito cream sauce, corn, and cheddar power the pizza.
A pizza takes about 25 minutes to bake.
This is the second deep-dish pie on the Tripping Billy tour; Millie’s Pizza in the Pan was the first.
The pizza is garnished with green onions and a pepper.
There aren’t a lot of white deep-dish pizzas.
Billy Zureikat wants to use his platform to help those with accesibility issues.
The pizza is available for carryout every Wednesday through May.
In the hours leading up to several gaming news events — like an indie event or a Nintendo Direct — you can see the rumblings of people online discussing a game called Hollow Knight: Silksong. Some share digital summoning circles constructed with emojis and dedicate them to the game in the hopes it will make an appearance at a showcase; others simply express their excitement by sharing memes prior to the event. During a digital event itself, you’ll see viewers spam the live chat with messages like “SKONG [with four airhorn emojis],” or “WHERE SILKSONG????!!??” Sometimes, the phrase “Silksong” will even trend online before one of these events because so many people are sharing their excitement.
All of this ruckus, just because fans just really want to hear a sliver of news about Hollow Knight: Silksong. The game — which fans shorten to Silksong — is the planned sequel to a game called Hollow Knight. Developer Team Cherry first announced the follow-up to its beloved Metroidvania in 2019; since then, it got a splashy trailer in 2022, but no concrete release date. And by now, its dedicated fan base has turned waiting for the game into one giant viral meme.
What is Hollow Knight: Silksong?
To understand the lasting popularity of Silksong, we need to look back at the game that preceded it: Hollow Knight. Developer Team Cherry first released the popular Metroidvania in 2017. At the time, the game stunned fans with its fantastical insectoid world and precise combat. Those elements, paired with its rich method of environmental storytelling, resulted in a gem of a game. Polygon hailed it as “unquestionably the finest Metroidvania ever made.”
Image: Team Cherry
Hollow Knight has racked up more than its fair share of devoted fans, so when Team Cherry surprised players with the announcement of a full-on sequel called Silksong, it drummed up plenty of buzz. The developers promised an original story, new bugs to meet, and new worlds to explore. What’s more is that fans would get to play as Hornet, a mysterious but beloved side character from the main game.
Fans excitedly awaited more news about the upcoming game, but none came. Years passed, and Team Cherry didn’t release any more trailers or news. With each passing gaming news event, it seemed all the more inevitable that players would get a release date, or a new trailer, or at least another peek at the project.
Finally, in 2022, the developer shared a new look at the game at an Xbox Showcase, but even then, the game had no stated release date. According to Xbox, however, the games in that showcase were going to be released in the next 12 months — meaning Silksong should have come out in 2023. But it didn’t. On May 9, 2023, Matthew Griffin from Team Cherry broke the news on X (formerly Twitter) that the game was not yet ready to be released and that fans should “expect more details from [Team Cherry] once we get closer to release.”
That was the last major update from the team, and since then, fans have been left in limbo — while still repeatedly expressing their hearts’ desires for the game online.
Why do fans shout about Silksong online?
In the years since its initial announcement, expressing a desire to see Silksong has become a viral bit online. At this point, you can’t watch a gaming news stream without people mentioning Silksong. People on social media will share fan art, memes, and reaction posts all in anticipation of the game, or making fun of the fact that there might not be more news about it. The avid fandom can spark the ire of other viewers in chats, and Silksong fans have inadvertently psyched up others excited for the game because they so regularly cause the game’s title to trend on X. All because people just want to express a desire to see this game.
Polygon reached out to Team Cherry to ask about what it’s been like to see fans talk about the game. We will update this article if we hear back.
Hollow Knight did sell in the millions, but that isn’t necessarily what seems to be causing this reaction to Silksong. It’s just that this game — which is genuinely a fantastic game to play — has inspired a super-dedicated cult following. The people who love the game just really adore it, and they want to see the next game released.
In this sense, Silksong does just come across as the next generation’s version of the entire “localize Mother 3” movement. Nintendo has never released an official English localization of Mother 3 in North America, but people have been asking for it for years. To this day, fans still beg Nintendo on social media to release the game, and several fans have regularly pulled IRL stunts to bring attention to the game. Being a Mother 3 fan is almost as much about wanting Mother 3 to come out officially in the U.S. as it is actually playing or enjoying the content of the game.
That all being said, Silksong has a much better chance of being released than the official English version of Mother 3. Team Cherry has assured fans that while the team might not have revealed too much, development is progressing. So I guess fans will have to rely on their summoning circles until then.
Late this month, a New York-based cookie chain is opening its first Chicago location. Chip City, which debuted seven years ago in Queens, New York, will debut in late April in Gold Coast. The chain also has plans for Lincoln Park, Wicker Park, and Lakeview, according to a news release.
The chain has 35 locations in New York, New Jersey, and Florida, and last year it arrived in the Washington, D.C. area. Started by friends Peter Phillips and Teddy Gailas in 2017, the expansion has been funded, in part, by a $10 million investment by New York restaurateur Danny Meyer. Meyer, the founder of Union Square Hospitality, is perhaps best known around Chicago for his investment in Shake Shack and GreenRiver, a shuttered Streeterville restaurant that earned a Michelin star. His fingerprints are seen elsewhere in the expansions of chains such as Tacombi, a casual Mexican restaurant with a West Loop location with a Wicker Park outlet on its way.
A rendering of Chip City Gold Coast.Chip City
Chip City goes through more than 40 flavors each year with options like peanut butter & jelly, oatmeal apple pie, and cannoli, and blueberry cheesecake. Other than cookies, there’s also a new “Chip Crookie” — a croissant stuffed with cookie dough.
In 2022, another New York chain, Levain Bakery, opened a Chicago location. With contenders like Levain, Insomnia, and Crumbl, the world of cookie chains has come a long way since Mrs. Fields debuted in the late ‘70s. Getting cookies delivered via a third-party company has its charm, but true Chicagoans just want a true Maurice Lenell comeback.
Chip City Chicago, 55 E. Chicago Avenue, scheduled for opening on Friday, April 26, 2024
Reach has fallen in the Halo TV universe. If you know anything about the lore of the Halo games, you know that the next thing that’s supposed to happen is Master Chief escaping from Covenant forces above Reach, his ship getting attacked, and then promptly crashing onto the series’ first Halo ring. In other words, this is basically the moment where the action starts. That is not what happened in the Halo TV series. Instead, Chief (Pablo Schreiber) and his friends took a reflective excursion to a backwater planet that felt a lot more like a detour than character development.
After escaping Reach, Chief and everyone else on the escape ship with him (which is basically all of the still-living series regulars except for Kate Kennedy’s Kai), visit Aleria, a small dirt farming planet with plenty of land to spare and nearly toxic soil. After an episode as big and exciting as the Fall of Reach, this feels like a very HBO-style respite: the kind of episode dedicated to taking stock of the characters we lost and examining the new shape of the world after a big shake-up. But those shows earn those reflective episodes with consistent quality before them, and they tend to make those quiet episodes feel ever bigger and more important than the loud ones. That was certainly not the case in Halo season 2’s fifth episode.
Photo: Adrienn Szabo/Paramount Plus
In defense of the Halo series’ entire premise, it has no obligation to follow the events of the games directly. Since the show’s announcement, the creative team behind it has been careful to specify that this series takes place in the “Silver Timeline,” which is completely separate from the canon of the games. So going somewhere other than Halo after the Fall of Reach isn’t really a problem. The problem is that the show once again fails the most basic and important test of doing interesting things with those changes.
The series seems convinced that the audience loves and cares about its side characters. But they’re just not interesting. During this episode the most coherent plotline we spend time with involves Soren (the wonderful Bokeem Woodbine, trying his best as always) and his wife searching for their child. We see them question various people around the village, and even find someone they think is keeping their kid from them. But by the end of the episode, they discover that he was actually kidnapped by the UNSC — an organization we almost exclusively know at this point as the military that loves kidnapping children. It’s a bland, “no shit” reveal that feels both too obvious and totally meaningless at the same time. Another of the episode’s plotlines involves Riz, a Spartan who was introduced just a few episodes ago, deciding that she wants to be a farmer now that she is too injured to be a Spartan.
With plotlines this boring, about characters that the show never really does a good job of convincing us to care about, it’s getting awfully hard not to long for the circular perfection and alien weirdness of the Halo rings that give this franchise its name. So why aren’t we there yet?
The answer seems to lie in the Halo show’s approach to the rings in general. The series clearly recognizes one of the great strengths of the first game was that Halo was profoundly mysterious. But the show is approaching that mystery in a very different way than the original game did.
Photo: Adrienn Szabo/Paramount Plus
For the game, the mystery of Halo was in how little information you had about both the alien ring and the video game’s world. Aside from the basic premise of humanity being on the back foot in a war against aliens, almost everything else was a black box. So when you crash-land on Halo in the game’s second level (a level also called “Halo”), the path is clear for the game to slowly reveal its secrets about Forerunners, the Covenant religion, the Flood, 343 Guilty Spark, and everything else that feels commonplace in the series today. The TV series, on the other hand, decided to make Halo a destination. Instead of giving us no lore, it’s been stacking up piles and piles of lore through its first two seasons and dangling the Halo ring in front of his via characters’ prophetic visions. This path to Halo isn’t inherently bad; a well-done buildup and reveal can make for a fantastic moment in a TV show. But like the Hatch in Lost, the key is that you have to show the audience why the thing is mysterious and important — you have to really prove it to us, not just have characters bombard us with insistent dialogue that it matters. And more importantly, the characters actually have to get into it eventually.
None of this is to say that the show has run out of time to make it to Halo, or even that it can’t be good once it gets there. But it is to say that the journey there so far has felt profoundly misjudged and way too slow, and it’s starting to feel like it might not happen at all. In this episode, Makee (Charlie Murphy) tries to convince the Arbiter to go to the Halo rings because she insists that the Prophets are lying about the Great Journey, telling the rest of the Covenant fanciful stories about its importance and transcending the physical realm, but never actually planning to take them along on their trip to divinity. Now, I’m not saying that the Halo series is the Prophets and we’re the rest of the Covenant, but I am saying that our lack of a journey to a Halo ring is starting to feel a little suspicious, and they’re running out of time to convince me we’re really going.
When Shonya Williams, better known as Chef Royce, received a call from her daughter Tot in winter of 2022, she thought her prayers had been answered. Williams had suffered a stroke in 2019, which led her to close her two-and-a-half-year-old restaurant, Kiss My Dish in suburban Oswego. A veteran restaurateur who has opened four restaurants, Royce was taking time to heal while working as a caterer when she received her daughter’s call about a restaurant location that was being advertised as a turnkey rental at the corner of Armitage Avenue and Halsted Street in Lincoln Park.
Williams was already looking to open a new restaurant on the city’s West Side in Austin, but her daughter’s call was a sign: “I really wanted to be back on the scene again. [Cooking] is what I love. So I asked God, ‘When is it gonna be my turn again? I want to do this again.”
Williams signed a lease in Lincoln Park on March 15, 2023 across the street from where Chicago’s largest hospitality group, Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises, has three restaurants and a fourth on its way. She spent two months renovating the former Taco Bar space, opening Soul Prime, a soul food restaurant with fried chicken, fried catfish, and lobster on the menu, in time for Mother’s Day. But just four months later with a monthly rent of $14,338.51 and sales of less than $1,000 a day, she was thinking of closing.
Shonya Williams is better known as Chef Royce.Chef Royce of Soul Prime stands in front of her restaurant smiling wearing an apron.
Mac and cheese is one of the specialties.
“I didn’t have loans or grants,” Williams says. “I have money that I have saved on my own. And I used every single dollar getting the place to a beautiful look inside, so that I can match this amazing community. I needed support from this actual community that I sit in, which I didn’t know a whole lot about. Unfortunately, I did not spend any money on marketing. I felt like people knew [me and my work], and it didn’t work like that.”
Williams remains in business thanks, in part, to a visit from Keith Lee, an MMA fighter and popular food reviewer on TikTok. Lee reviewed Soul Prime in September 2023. In the video, he swoons over the collard green dip, fried chicken dipped in hot honey sauce, and peach lemonade while sitting curbside. He enters the restaurant after his meal is complete (something he says he’s never done before) to talk to chef Williams, who shares her struggle in bringing her vision to life and keeping it afloat.
The video is uplifting, finishing off with Lee asking Williams to ring him up for $2,200 — matching her sales for that day. But it’s Williams’s comments on the neighborhood that tell the true story of her struggle: A Black woman in a predominantly white area of Chicago trying to serve food that’s often misunderstood by the wider American culture outside of Black neighborhoods.
“I’m not getting a whole lot of reception from the community, but I need them because I’m in their community,” Williams says to Lee in the video. This is one of the few times she breaks eye contact with him and looks out the window, referring to the Lincoln Park area. “I haven’t got it.”
Soul food cooks often have to battle outside perception.
According to a 2023 Chicago Metropolitan Agency for City Planning report, Lincoln Park is a predominantly white community where 80 percent of people are white in the neighborhood even though white people comprise only 33 percent of Chicago’s population. The median household income level in the 60614 zip code is $123,044, well above the city’s median of $65,781. Soul Prime is the neighborhood’s only soul food restaurant. Soul food in Chicago is concentrated on the South and West sides.
“Soul food is one of the African heritage cuisines in the United States, bringing together the culinary ingredients, traditions, and techniques of West Africa, Western Europe, and the Americas,” says Adrian Miller, James Beard Award-winning author of Soul Food: The Surprising Story of an American Cuisine, One Plate at a Time. “More importantly, it’s really the food that Black migrants took out of the South and transplanted in other parts of the country during the Great Migration. It is socially stigmatized because it’s associated with slavery and poverty food.”
From catfish and grits to short rib, Soul Prime’s menu has something for everyone.
Before Lee’s visit one acquaintance advised Williams to lower her prices, add salads, and bundle sides in the cost and presentation of her main dishes, instead of selling them separately. But that’s not how soul food works, Williams says. “I don’t know how to cook any other cuisines,” Williams says. “I make no salads because that’s not what I am. That’s not where I come from. That’s not what soul food is.”
Miller says this is a situation that speaks to the larger issue of a restaurateur considered an outsider, having to legitimize itself outside of her own community, while simultaneously having to educate those unfamiliar with the traditions and prep of her cuisine. Today, it’s disproportionately falling on Black influencers and celebrities like Lee to seek out, sample, and celebrate Black-owned restaurants. Just look at Ayo Edebiri: The prominent Black Golden actress and star of The Bear, who won a Golden Globe this past January for her role in the culinary drama, used her platform after the awards gala to shout out Oooh Wee It Is in Hyde Park as “some of the best food [she’s] had in her life.” These spotlights are often a boon for the business, but they highlight a seemingly ever-present segregation between communities and cuisines and how they’re valued.
Chef Williams has opened four restaurants and brought soul food to Lincoln Park’s toney community.
“People don’t want to pay a lot of money for that, so that’s why it doesn’t surprise me at all,” that someone without the understanding of soul food’s history and complexities would suggest lowering prices, Miller says. “If [Soul Prime] were just to call themselves a Southern restaurant, they could charge a lot more money. It’s really more about class and place than it is about race. People in the same socioeconomic class are usually eating the same kind of food.”
Chef Erick Williams faced a similar conundrum with Virtue in Hyde Park before he won his James Beard Award in 2022. Soul food and Southern food may look similar, but they are not the same. Miller says that soul food tends to be sweeter, more heavily spiced, and higher in fat. Soul food gets its name from the cadre of Black jazz musicians who were miffed by white jazz musicians making the most money from the musical genre that they created, says Miller. “They decided to take the music to a place where they thought white musicians could not mimic the sound. That was the sound of the Black church in the rural South. This gospel-tinged jazz sound emerged and the jazz artists themselves started calling it ‘soul’ and ‘funky’ soul. It was really ‘soul music’ first and then ‘soul’ just caught on in the culture: soul music, soul brothers, soul sister, soul food.”
The term is most typically associated with the Black Power movement of the 1960s but its usage was floating around in Black culture well before that, Miller adds. The sentiment is echoed in the 1983 book Bricktop, by Ada “Bricktop” Smith and Jim Haskins.
“I learned about soul food [in 1910], only they didn’t call it soul food then,” shares Smith, the Chicago woman and entrepreneur who became a legend overseas for playing nightlife host during Paris’ 1920s. Her clientele included F. Scott Fitzgerald, Josephine Baker, John Steinbeck, Duke Ellington, and Elizabeth Taylor. “Soul was something you didn’t talk about except in church. Soul food was Southern food. There weren’t all that many Negroes in Chicago when I was growing up, so it wasn’t until I went to places like Louisville and Cincinnati that I met up with Southerners and ate things like spare ribs and biscuits, sweet potatoes, and cornbread, chitlins, and fried chicken.”
Chef Royce is very proud of her team of mostly Black women.
Miller’s work is an effort to dispel misconceived notions around soul food and destigmatize years of history that have relegated it to lowbrow cuisine, synonymous with Black communities, instead of acknowledging its cultural significance that carries years of history within each bite of meat and three.
“The other main critique is that [soul food] is unhealthy,” says Miller. “There are people who think that by making soul food and serving it to our community. You’re literally digesting white supremacy because you’re celebrating stuff from slavery. There are others that say ‘Why are you serving us this food? It’s killing us because they’re looking at the health outcomes in Black communities and directly tying it to soul food. If you actually look at what enslaved people were eating, it’s very close to what we call vegan today.”
He explains how an enslaved person rose before sunrise and was fed “a trough filled with crumbled cornbread and buttermilk.” Their midday meal included seasonal vegetables, which might include meat to flavor the veggies but usually, it was only vegetables. Supper was whatever was leftover from lunch. “Only on the weekends, when work either stopped or slowed down did enslaved people get access to white flour, white sugar, meat and have cakes and desserts. That was special occasion food.”
“Like any other immigrant cuisine, soul food is the food Black people took out of the South and transplanted in other places,” says Miller. “There’s certain signatures [dishes] that show up in celebrations. If you look at any immigrant cuisine in the U.S., typically an immigrant restaurateur is serving the celebration food of their culture, because they want to show off the very best of their culture. They don’t highlight the day-in and day-out stuff. And that’s the way to think about soul food. So these things like fried chicken, barbecue, fried catfish — people are not eating that every day.”
TikTokker Keith Lee was very excited about this place.
In Lincoln Park, Williams says she’s hopeful her restaurant can find a niche: “We shouldn’t have to go through ups and downs because of our skin color and I am glad to help break that barrier with food,” she says.
Miller says there are lessons to be learned from the barbecue world where the genre was once also considered “working class, cheap food, and now people are paying $36 a pound for brisket and $20 a pound for ribs. A lot has to do with barbecue being seen as cool and hip.” That’s essentially what these influencers are doing — spreading the word about something great that other traditional arbiters of value and attention may have ignored.
To date, the September TikTok video at Soul Prime has 9 million views, 1.2 million likes, and more than 23,000 comments. Lee recapped 2023 by ranking his top cities for food (ranking Chicago in his top three) and re-mentioning Soul Prime. Today, Soul Prime is still in business, which Williams credits to Lee’s visit.
“The Keith Lee community is my local community,” says Williams. “They come and say they were sent by Keith Lee. My community is Black people. I know that we don’t live in Lincoln Park. Some of them follow me from the South Side, the South Suburbs, the West Side. The ones who I see who are non-Black, walking up and down the street, those are the ones that I really wanted to reach. They’re coming in now, I love them. I’m grateful.”
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